In his collection of essays titled Mythologies, Roland Barthes discusses professional wrestling as a “spectacle” rather than a sport; that is to say, one is meant to be watched while the other is meant to be played. Silverstein’s 2003 discussion of his notion of “indirect indexicality” correlates linguistic features and social practices with a subject’s desire to align themselves with a certain social group. The ways that professional wrestling engages with spectacle-oriented practices, especially the linguistic and stylistic personae developed by wrestlers, make it good contender for weekly primetime television. Because of the disproportionate amount of male viewership and spectacle quality of televised wrestling, I argue that the performance and practices of the professional wrestlers are negotiated to purposely embody a specific set of contemporary hypermasculine ideologies within the frame of American hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995, 2001; Butler,1990).
For this paper, I examine the ways that “trash talking” in professional wrestling contributes to Connell’s notion of contemporary masculinity. My data set for the project includes linguistically rich portions from televised wrestling matches and match promotion clips provided by The World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Company, drawing from The 50 best talkers in wrestling history. During each clip in the dataset, I found 54 total instances of a wrestler mentioning their own physical strength and talent, their affluence, their heterosexual appeal, and the use of third-person self-reference. These linguistic practices allow wrestlers to effectively align themselves with hegemonic masculinity. I examine the variation of these practices amongst four wrestlers: Randy “Macho Man” Savage, Ric Flair, The Rock, and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Because Randy Savage and Ric Flair were prominent wrestlers in the 1980s and The Rock and Stone Cold in the 1990s, the ever-changing idea of hegemonic American masculinity will be constructed differently by each wrestler, but will be constructed nonetheless.
About the presenterEmily Corvi
Emily Corvi is a rising undergraduate junior at CUNY Brooklyn College, although due to her membership in the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies Program, she spends most of her academic career at CUNY Hunter. She is double majoring in sociolinguistics and classics, and her current research interests are gender, race, and food.